millihelen

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. A unit of measure of pulchritude, corresponding to the amount of beauty required to launch one ship.

Etymologies

From the SI prefix milli- (indicating a thousandth) + Helen, of Troy, the maiden so beautiful that her abduction by Paris sparked the Trojan War and was said, in Christopher Marlowe's 1604 Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, to have ‘launched a thousand ships’. (Wiktionary)

Examples

The one I remembered was millihelen, the amount of beauty required to launch just one ship.

Martin Harris Slobodkin Cambridge, Massachusetts If the milli-helen of W.K. Viertel [III, 4] is accepted by the American National Metric Council, they will probably insist that it be written millihelen, i.e., without the hyphen.

David Lance Goines, in this very funny essay Helen of Troy , argues that the definition needs to be a little more complicated, to reflect Helen's accomplishments accurately.

The exact citation from Marlowe states that Helen's face "launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium", suggesting that mere ship-launching ability is not enough, that any candidate measure of pulchritude also needs to capture skill as an arsonist.

This leads to a revised definition of the millihelen as "beauty sufficient to launch one Homeric warship and burn down a house".

Yes, from Helen of Troy, in the phrase of Christopher Marlowe's Faustus: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships...?" A milliHelen is a unit of gorgeousness sufficient to launch just one ship. A microHelen is enough to get one, maybe two, sailors all excited. Not exactly ugly, but fairly run-of-the-mill mud-fence sort of a mug, y'know?